The Radical Reckoning

I like to watch sticky-fingered, and crumby-mouthed children who pull onto their parent's necks, exasperated and eager to be held. They press their chest into their mom or dad's shoulder and drape over them like melted wax.

I love watching people in conversation from afar and bear witness to how their mannerisms differ or mirror one anothers. I like to guess their relationship and smile at the smallness of them from my viewpoint. I remember that their present connection is just a speck in the background of my people-watching. 

I love to hear people's reactions to news. I like to silently testify for their jubilant reactions, their shrieking, even. I like to see them clutch their hands together, forcing all these happy atoms between their palms to kiss as they rejoice over the message.

I like seeing when people bust a move in a public setting, albeit most of the time those people are my own father and I.

Sometimes if I’m jogging outside I’ll take off running at a super unsustainable speed just for the endorphins and for the sake of sprinting. Not because its metabolism-boosting-calorie-burning-mentally- stimulating or any of that hooha.

Remember when chase was running as fast as you can? When do we run as fast as we can anymore? For fun?

When is the last time you hugged someone and melted like wax into their body? When is the last time you sprinted, panted, felt like your heart was on fire just for the hell of it? When did you last hip thrust to a beat in the company of others in the most awkward and distorted of ways regardless of the setting just because it felt riiiiiighttttt? Have you recently peppered someone's forehead with one hundred kisses, loudly smooching lips against their soft skin?

Sometimes the sounds of those kisses against skin sound like a Star Wars spaceship shooting laser beams.

Did you try it? Kiss your own hand five times and you might hear what I’m talking about.

Did these little pleasures get shoved to the outer scope of our daily lives? 

I feel as though we are averting our eyes, our hearts, and our souls from one another the more we actively decide to look away. When we make the decision to not engage, to not move our bodies or collide with another one, we are choosing distance.

And distance is so NOT what we need right now.

Something has been brewing inside of me the past few days and memories and profiles of some people I keep clutched to my heart.

I think that I have carried around with me, tucked in my chest pocket some, uh, doom, we’ll name it.

A doom-like feeling about the current way of the world right now. Bad things and bad people are as sure and certain as the tide rising and lowering, but maybe it’s my own consciousness facing the music that feels like the difference. Our politicians are evil, celebrities are deceitful, major companies are conniving and advancing technology is leaving this indelible footprint in our lives that does nothing but leave us far more disconnected to one another in real life.

Even if we all must walk around with the weight of doom nestled in our chest pocket, the only way we’ll stop feeling it is by becoming oh-so-radical.

The good that has managed to inch its way out of this pocket of doom, just wriggling out of the tattered seams, are the abnormal and radical people that remind us that our spirits are still healthy and strong; our organic and human behaviors still see the light of day, and deep down our spirits remain untouchable by the weight of the world. 

Personally, I am gripping, I mean really white-knuckling, the memories of the people I know that live so authentically that it is considered abnormal. I consider them to be radical. 

Hello Caroline Heater! Hello Ella Brucker!

Some of the most beautiful things we get to experience in this life are right under our noses. It takes a special kind of radicality to bring it back to life.

As people become more insecure, more painfully invested in a fake digital world, we find ourselves existing in these fabricated outlets. Outlets that are full of awfully hateful and embellished content, that feed us visuals of the world around us that aren’t real.

THEY AREN’T EVEN REAL ANYMORE! GOOD GRIEF!

If we were to classify life’s tragedies like hurricanes, namely via the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, (yeah this girl knows her meteorology) this one would absolutely be a 5 the way I see it. It's crippling and depressing notion that people are becoming strangers to their own biological makeup- the same biology encourages connection.

But also it reminds me that now, there is something beautiful blossoming in between the broken and mangled cracks in the sidewalk. It’s the resilience against a shifting culture that is making everyone quieter and more subdued. I am fixated, rooting for that one little flower that sprouts after a big storm. Or I suppose in this case, it blossoms in spite of it. 

This little flower that is sprouting is the radicality of behaving differently in a world that rewards sameness and predictability. 

Not to be a fear monger or anything, but we’re just not here for very long, guys. Maybe eighty five years if we eat well and don’t get disease-stricken. Everything is so temporary, so fleeting but luckily for us, that is really Just. The. Point.

Impermanence is the point.

Time is running out whether you are paying attention or not. I mean your very impermanent life here on Earth is but a speck in someone else's people-watching background. 

Hug very tightly, kiss cartoonishly loud, gaze deeply, hip thrust awkwardly, run fast (just for fun), and then do it twice on Sunday because this is all we get guys.